For Dungeons & Dragons, the magic is in the memories

article by Lillian Barkley

In most games, crying isn’t a good sign. But my character, a young elf, had survived an enemy attack only after making a desperate bargain with an ancient and cruel being. In exchange for her life, she could never return home. With a magically assisted message, she was saying goodbye to her family — played equally emotionally by my friend 800 miles away — and my eyes were welling with tears of joy over it. Our friends, scattered in different cities, cheered on our call over a scene well done.
We’d been playing Dungeons & Dragons together for five years, starting because we wanted to keep in touch after graduating high school. None of us had played much before, but it didn’t matter. We learned together, navigating the rules and making each other laugh (and sometimes cry) with the story we created.
Dungeons & Dragons turns 50 this year. Over the decades since the game was created and designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, it has been transformed in the public consciousness from an image of social misfits playing in basements to a commercial behemoth. But the emotional bonds forged along the way are what players remember. We asked five of them to share a moment that stuck with them.
— Lillian Barkley, Opinions audience strategy editor

1970s: A miracle from my brother

(Anderson Cooper is a journalist and anchors “Anderson Cooper 360” on CNN.)

Fletcher, my elven thief, was dear to my heart. He wore a red cape and, in my mind, bore a close resemblance to D’Artagnan from “The Three Musketeers.” Fletcher and his fellow adventurers would slay monsters and collect treasure. Ever the magnanimous hero, he hosted a party for the townspeople using his windfall of gold.
I was around 11, and my older brother and I had started playing a new game. We had previously played with toy soldiers, staging elaborate troop movements through our house by following the rules from H.G. Wells’s “Little Wars,” so we had a history of having a joint fantasy in our head. This new game, Dungeons & Dragons, was a natural extension of that.
There were polyhedral dice, which were interesting, but it wasn’t a board game. It was a storytelling game. It was both happening in our imaginations and playing out in real life with our friends around a table. We were all in this fantasy together, a group delusion in which everybody bought into the reality. And it was extremely important to me.
My brother, Carter, two years older than I was, came to it first after our father died in 1978. It allowed us to lose ourselves together and gave us a brief respite from the sadness that had descended on us. When we were playing D&D, we weren’t stuck in the silences of not talking about him. We could talk about D&D.
I see us now hunched in a circle, waiting for this incredible adventure to begin. My brother set it up, hiding his papers behind a screen to keep the elaborate plans he’d made for us secret, and there was a palpable excitement as we wondered what magical world he had created.
This game gave me license to extend my childhood just a bit longer and permission to feel joy and excitement again. I was a sad boy, stunned and terrified by my dad’s sudden death, but playing D&D, I could dive into the table and emerge on the other side as a swashbuckling elven thief, slaying orcs and other monsters. But death found me even in D&D. The game may not have winners and losers like other games, but it does have loss. I dont recall exactly what happened, but in some underground lair, my character, Fletcher, was killed. I was stunned and inconsolable. I refused to accept the death of this imaginary alter-ego for whom I deeply cared. Thankfully, the game allows for miracles the real world does not. My brother, using the mechanics afforded to him in his omniscient role, prolonged Fletcher’s story by magically reviving him.
We stopped playing a few months later. My brother, Carter, was developing other interests and D&D no longer seemed so cool. He died by suicide when he was 23. In going through his things recently, I found his “Dungeon Masters Guide” and “Monster Manual,” along with a binder full of hand-written notes he’d made for our games and detailed maps of mazes he’d created for our characters to explore. I’m not sure what to do with them, but I can’t throw them away because they are such a part of who he was when we were kids.
The care and imagination my brother put into our adventures inspired in me a love of exploring and storytelling. I left high school early and rode in a truck across sub-Saharan Africa for several months, from Johannesburg to Bangui in the Central African Republic. It was the beginning of a lifetime of travel and adventure and learning to tell stories of my own.

1980s: A mythology of the mind

(Lev Grossman is the author of “The Bright Sword” and the “Magicians” trilogy.)

We started hearing rumors about it when I was in fourth grade. Nobody knew exactly what Dungeons & Dragons was except that it wasn’t quite a normal game; it was something weird and arcane and important, like sex or calculus. An older boy who’d played it showed me, furtively, a map hand-drawn in ballpoint pen on graph paper. I struggled to grasp the concept. Was it a board game? Like Sorry? But the pieces could go, like, in any direction? And there’s more than one board? “In D&D,” the boy said sagely, “there are many maps.”
Then one day my friend Ben called and said his brother had a copy of the game. Did I want to play? I did. I hung up the phone — it was a rotary phone, the kind that’s firmly attached to a wall — and solemnly announced to my family: “This is the greatest day of my life.”
It wasn’t, but it was a very good day. We probably played the Village of Hommlet, which came standard with the Basic Set. Ben’s older brother was the dungeon master. I played a magic user, so I didn’t wear armor, and my only weapon was a dart. I cast my one first-level spell — magic missile, obviously — and then I died. I loved it.
I was raised with no particular religion, and the suburb of Boston where I grew up was an arid, unspiritual place. D&D supplied me with something I was desperately missing: a mythology. I was overflowing with surging pre-pubescent feelings that were beyond my ability to manage or understand, but D&D activated in me vast, hitherto dormant realms. I was learning how to navigate the dungeons of my own subconscious, with their many maps, where the dragons lived, and how to survive there.
As much as I loved it, when it came to the actual playing of D&D, I was awful — both at playing it and to play it with. On some level I still didn’t get the concept of D&D because all I wanted to do was win it. If I’m being charitable, I might say that I cared too much. I would do anything to keep my character from dying: lie about my dice rolls, conveniently forget rules, invent other rules and argue legalistically with the DM about them. My more imaginative friends would role-play as their characters, act out the scenes and do the voices. I just tried to get all the treasure I could.
As I got older, my tastes evolved. Reading the rulebooks gradually replaced the pleasure of actually playing D&D. I drew vast unplayable maps and combed through the books for bizarre minutiae — the “Players Handbook” contained a reference to a weapon called the Bohemian ear spoon, and I spent hours speculating about the nature of this cruelest of pole-arms. I sought out the more obscure and bizarre modules, like the infamously unbeatable “Queen of the Demonweb Pits.” Much of my adult sexuality is probably rooted in my contemplation of the alluring drawing of Tlazolteotl, Aztec goddess of vice, in the “Deities and Demigods” handbook.
It didn’t last forever. Eventually, my attention wandered — like Jackie Paper, I got interested in other toys. D&D offered many pleasures but not the pleasure of feeling cooler and cleverer than other people, and I, a callow teenager, went off in search of games that were easier to win.
But the dragons would have the last laugh. Years later, when I grew up and became a writer, I initially chose the path of conventional literary fiction — I wanted to write books that were respectable, full of my caustic, clear-eyed observations about good old-fashioned social reality. But I didn’t have much success at it, and it was a long time before I realized I wasn’t a literary writer at all. It wasn’t until I changed horses and wrote a novel about people who cast spells and explored a magic land that I found my voice and had my first success.
I didn’t belong in the surface world, with the cool and clever people. My place was down in the dungeons, where the dragons lived. That’s where the treasure was all along.

(continued)